Wisdom Corner by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
David Heska Wanbli Weiden, college professor and member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, recipient of multiple fellowships and residencies, rang all the bells with his award-winning debut novel Winter Counts. Wisdom Corner is his much anticipated follow-up featuring protagonist Virgil Wounded Horse. In the first book of this impactful series set on South Dakota’s Redbud Reservation, Virgil cleared his nephew Nathan of charges of dealing hard drugs, and now the high-school senior resides with him.
Virgil has promised his girlfriend Marie that he would cease working as a hired vigilante meting out punishments when traditional law enforcement on the Rosebud Reservation failed. In a manner not dissimilar to Paladin, the “knight without armor in a savage land” of TV’s Have Gun Will Travel TV (1957-1963) fame, Virgil strives, sometimes violently, to right wrongs and render justice. But when Jerome Iron Shell, the gentle medicine man, friend and honored tribal elder who conducted ritual prayers and purifications of the sweat lodge ceremonies has been found brutally murdered, Virgil vows to find his killer.
Also plaguing the reservation is “the 705”, a rival gang from the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation which is bent on usurping the Wisdom Corner territory from the local thugs, hustlers and bootleggers. A place that had been nearly sacred for the tribal citizens to congregate, exchange stories and advice had devolved into a dangerous wasteland littered with broken bottles and other debris of drug manufacturing and illegal liquor sales.
A Harrowing Legacy
Wisdom Corner is densely plotted with several concurrent storylines. Reservation resident Marie is campaigning for a position in a heated city council election, but her overruling ambition is to improve the quality of food prepared in the reservation senior center, schools and casino. She has honed her cooking skills by training with a chef expert in bison, wild game, herbs and vegetables — Native American foods that have been prepared and eaten by Indigenous peoples for centuries. Mitch Gagnon, the incumbent city council leader, is a shady, money-grubbing politician securely in the pockets of unscrupulous developers who would heedlessly destroy tribal ancestors’ graves in the avaricious pursuit of profits.
In the now-defunct South Dakota School Land Project, activists have recently discovered a cover-up of the deaths of several children buried in unmarked graves. This location had been one of many “Indian boarding schools” found in several places in the United States where Native children were taken from tribal lands, sometimes forcibly, stripped of their culture and forbidden to speak their language in a callous policy of forced assimilation into white society. Discovering that his Aunt Ruth was among those concealed deaths personalizes Virgil’s determination to prevent the proposed rampant development. Further complicating the tribes grievances, rights to these Native lands had not been restored when the schools were closed, nor have there been any sort of reparations made.
History’s Consequences
A central theme in both Winter Counts and Wisdom Corner is the breakdown within the tribal lands of the criminal justice system which has allowed offenders to repeatedly avoid prosecution through the use of archaic law as legal loophole. The Major Crimes Act of 1885 granted the federal government exclusive jurisdiction over a specific list of Native American felony offenses, effectively depriving tribal courts the authority of local prosecution. Short of murder, the Federal Bureau of Investigation typically declines to investigate crimes, and as a consequence, arrested offenders are released in approximately 50% of incidences.
The fact-based, socio-economic distress of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation — with its inadequate health care, lack of educational opportunities, high crime, homelessness, alcohol and drug abuse — delivers striking and gritty realism to this work of fiction. Weiden has produced a complex and unpredictable nail-biting crime novel while incorporating documented history, making Wisdom Corner a riveting thriller deserving of a wide audience.
David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is the author of Wisdom Corner. His debut novel, Winter Counts, was nominated for an Edgar Award and was the winner of the Anthony, Thriller, Lefty, Barry, Macavity, Spur, and other awards. The novel was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Indie Next pick, main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best mystery and thriller novels of all time.
His short fiction appears in the anthologies The Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2022, Never Whistle at Night, Denver Noir, and others. His nonfiction appears in the New York Times, Shenandoah, Alta, Poets & Writers, and other books and journals. He was Indigenous Artist in Residence at Brown University and has received fellowships from PEN America, MacDowell, Ucross, Ragdale, Sewanee, and Tin House. He’s Professor of English and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Stony Brook University in New York.
